


Light Up the World

by elumish



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Episode: s08e10 Endgame, F/M, Friendship, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-03-21 05:27:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3679650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elumish/pseuds/elumish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He didn’t think he could survive her death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light Up the World

This was why fraternization laws existed. This exact situation, which kept replaying over and over in Jack’s mind despite the fact that he was on his third beer with zero food in his stomach. When given the choice between protecting Earth and protecting Carter—and it had been about Carter, because he had faced Daniel dying and survived it, but he didn’t think he could survive her death—he would choose Carter. Because what was Earth without Carter? 

And they weren’t even sleeping together. They hadn’t ever slept together, at least not in the way that the brass would be concerned with. Not the them of this universe, at least.

Which reminded him that, damn, he hated parallel universes. They hadn’t even needed to deal with them for the past…while, and he still hated them. Carters who weren’t military, weren’t under his chain of command, were instead under his body in his bed—and that was not a road he should go down, not even just in his head. Before he had thought, maybe when he retired, but now Carter was with that shrub of a cop, and she seemed genuinely happy, and God knew she could never be happy with him. God knew nobody could ever be happy with him.

His doorbell rang, and Jack lurched to his feet, taking his beer with him. He couldn’t remember ordering a pizza, but at this point, he wouldn’t be surprised if he had. He was determined to get pass-out drunk, or at least drunk enough to forget that he had almost ordered the destruction of a ship with Carter and Jackson and Teal’c on it—or that he almost hadn’t.

He yanked open the door, trying to remember where he had put his wallet, then stopped when the person in front of him wasn’t the usual pizza boy. Or a pizza boy at all. Though they did have pizza.

“Carter?”

She half-shoved the pizza box at him, so he had to grab it or risk it flipping and landing on his feet. “You seemed upset, sir.”

“Not really the best time for company, Carter.”

“You still need to eat, don’t you?” Her eyes flicked to the pizza box, then back up to his face. She had gotten bolder in the past several years, though she had always been bold. Bold and beautiful and intelligent, and worth so much more than any of the rest of them. And it was his job to make the call that could potentially end her life. Damn it.

He was shaking his head before he knew it. “I shouldn’t—this is a bad idea.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Pizza? When most of your meals at home consist of beer, sir,”—her eyes finding the bottle he was now balancing precariously on top of the box—“pizza seems like an improvement.”

“Wasn’t what I meant, and you know it.” He waved the pizza box slightly, hoping the bottle wouldn’t tip when he did so. “You have a fiancé now.”

Her expression shuttered into flatness, and he regretted it even though he knew it was necessary. She couldn’t be showing up at his house anymore, not like this. “That’s not why I’m here, sir.”

“Why are you here, Carter?”

She hesitated for a second, and then something resolved behind her eyes, and she said, “Because you wouldn’t look me in the eye after we got off the Prometheus.”

Damn. She sounded hurt, and that might be the worst part about this whole thing. He had almost ordered the Prometheus to blow them to hell, and then he had hurt her with his reaction. But he couldn’t say that. His feelings weren’t her problem, shouldn’t be her problem. “The whole situation was almost FUBAR, and it wasn’t even the Goa’uld—it was the damn Trust.”

She stiffened, then relaxed, her shoulders straightening slightly. He hadn’t realized she had been hunched over until then, her shoulder slumped like she was somehow carrying too much weight. He didn’t know why she was here with him instead of at home with her fiancé, but at the moment, he wasn’t sure if he cared. “Yes, sir.” 

She started to turn away, and he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder, transferring the weight of the box to one hand. “Why don’t you come in?”

Carter turned back, hesitation clear on her face. “Sir?”

“You still need to eat, don’t you?”

There was a second where he thought she was going to turn him down, thought she was going to remind him that, while he might go back to an empty house when he left the base, she had someone waiting for her, someone she was going to marry, someone she could be with without worrying about regulations or careers or chains of command. And a part of him wanted her to do it. Because he needed the reminder that she wasn’t his, would never be his, that when the safety of the world hung in the balance, he shouldn’t hesitate to give the order.

And then she smiled and said, “Yes, sir,” and it was like she had lit up the world.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to post more of these post-episode/missing moment stories and then turn them all into a series once I can do so in some semblance of chronological order.


End file.
